A meeting at the Model Unit today was very fruitful. We finally sorted out how the ceiling mechanism which supposedly controls the Swordsman is going to be achieved. The solution, or in fact solutions plural, are actually quite simple, and in all fairness Ian has been suggesting one of them since day one. They’re difficult to describe, but they don’t require a walkway and they don’t pose a problem of connecting ropes in a live action plate to post production elements. The bulk of the mechanism will be achieved with a miniature element of some kind, but the section immediately above the Swordman will be in-camera.

Ian is starting to build up a crew for the set build. Meanwhile I’m trying to sort out a few things that just don’t want to be sorted, so it seems. It’s frustrating but it’s very familiar. As my previous features have taught me, pre-production is all about chasing people up.

This week I viewed another studio, lacking the convenient walkway of 3 Mills, but better in certain other respects. Cost is likely to be the deciding factor.
I’ve been looking through agents’ suggestions for a voice actor to portray the Wooden Swordsman. Among them were a Young One, a Doctor Who, several recognisably-voiced advert narrators, a son of a knight who I once witnessed singing an impromptu duet of “The Longest Time” in a kitchen with Davros’ father, and an actor I tried to attach to Dark Side as Julius Gale a couple of years ago.
This evening I met up with a stop motion animator and compositor, Susie Jones, and we discussed the practicalities of a Dynamation ceiling mechanism.

I’ve recently returned from a couple of weeks away, which were most welcome after three weeks of solid writing. The time to reflect helped solve some of the problems I had come up against, and although the redraft is going to take longer than I’d hoped, it’s definitely going to be worth it.
Today I gave the greenlight for construction on Max’s bio-suit. I can now reveal the company involved as FBFX. Ian had a very good meeting with them last week, and amongst other things they discussed how to inflate the suit. I’m not sure how, but Ian had found an extremely dodgy website showing photographs of a guy in an inflatable bondage suit which might serve as an ideal base for Max’s habiliments.

Casting director Jesse Malone is going to send out the breakdown tomorrow. I first heard of Jesse a couple of years back through Louis Savy from Sci-Fi London and the ‘Make Your Mark in Film’ campaign and I was delighted when she applied for this pilot.
Ian is currently working on the design for Max’s bio-suit, since next week we’re having a meeting with the company who are going to build it. I won’t reveal their name until it’s all official, but they have special costume credits on a number of major Hollywood films including Star Wars Episodes I & II, Gladiator and Troy.
And I’m about half way through my first pass at draft six of the screenplay, which is shaping up nicely.

Today I viewed a rehearsal room at 3 Mills Studios in East London, which may be suitable for filming the pilot in. It has the prerequisite overhead walkway and a Tim Burton-esque gin still in the corner which we could incorporate into the set, but it’s echoey and has windows which could be tricky to black out. It’s a viable option though, especially since getting an actual sound stage on my budget is going to be near impossible.
Meanwhile I’m working on the script. I’m trying to simplify it to get rid of some plot holes, but I seem to have created some new ones.

It took far longer than it really should have done to shoot all of the storyboard photos and lay them out with notes and arrows, and the name of Bill Gates was cursed more than once in the process. (I foolishly used Word to lay them out.)
There are a total of 57 set-ups, which over the three day shoot I’m planning seems quite leisurely compared with my previous films, but I’ve no doubt it will prove tough with the puppet to wrangle. Most of the Swordsman’s angles require the puppeteers to be below the level of his waist so as to be framed out – a configuration that we’ve barely tested as yet.
There is the issue of the ceiling mechanism still to solve too – the cogs and gears and pulleys which supposedly operate the Swordsman. I’m investigating both a full-size in-camera solution, and a stop motion miniature solution.

AJ and I finished off the choreography today. I had built a tenth scale model of the set – those of you who haven’t seen any of the videomatics can only guess at the staggering quality of this model – so we used that to block out the action, rather than exerting ourselves with sticks as before. We came up with some pretty good gags (not the “ha ha” kind).
The main reason for building the model is to shoot photo-boards, i.e. photographed storyboards. With the fight choreography now fixed, I can be far more specific in my shot decisions than when the original videomatic was filmed at Christmas 2006.
Meanwhile, I’m talking to casting directors. Gradually, the snowball starts to, er, snowball.

I’ve been pretty busy the last month or so, moving house and travelling all over the place. It’s amazing how slow filmmaking can be. I once met a man who took eleven years to make a feature, and I’m beginning to see how I might break his record.
Earlier this week AJ and I got together to lock down the sword choreography for the first sequence of the pilot. It was just the two of us, so I had to “fight” him with a metal stick. I needed to get it on camera because neither of us knows the terminology or notation to write the moves down.
Soul Searcher‘s doing well in the States. Loose Cannon seem to have given it a pretty good push. And it’s been picked up for distribution in Indonesia too. I can’t wait to watch a dubbed version of it some day. I shall be very amused.

I’m getting quotes for a special costume, a Victorian biosuit. I’ve started to think about casting too.
Ian and his girlfriend and I went to an open evening at a special FX company last night. There were gremlins, a rubber car battery, that pesky BBC 2 logo, a giant quarterback, Audrey II in a range of sizes. One man made it snow. Another got set on fire. Watching a body burn stunt in the flesh is really quite scary.
Amongst the pyromaniacs demonstrating explosions, who should I find but Toby Stewart, the man who blew up the train for Soul Searcher. He’s still making things go pop and whoomph.